from breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca to fediverse@lemmy.world on 21 Feb 18:12
https://lemmy.ca/post/39513727
A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And itâs funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen â the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.
Still, a lot of talented writers â including some that I subscribe to â publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newtonâs publication Platformer, Molly Whiteâs newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.
. . .
If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers donât have to do anything to continue paying you.
threaded - newest
Newsletters? Google killed RSS so we could have newsletters?
Google weirdly gets a lot of credit for killing things that are very much alive and well.
arenât podcasts still RSS. Iâm like 90% sure they are.
RSS is the hero that saved us from Spotify (et at.) walling off podcasts behind their paywall.
I donât think weâve been saved just yet. Their market share is still growing and they donât support importing RSS feeds. Nor do they support outgoing video feeds for RSS. And they continue to pay for exclusive partnerships.
I donât think weâre completely saved forever but they tried making podcasts Spotify-exclusive. I remember a bunch of Gimlet podcast hosts being like âplease come to Spotify to listen to us â itâs better than it used to be!â They ended up caving because people didnât listen. Podcasting is built around RSS â even though people arenât really aware of it â and people expect to get them this way.
Iâm following everyone from substack and every other resource on RSS. Nothing dead about it. Maybe someone is unhappy with their particular way of accessing it? Iâve used Feedly ever since Google ruined their own reader. Google abandoned a lot of things during that period of innovation.
Yes and ironically there are services like kill the newsletter that will re-RSS your tired ass newsletter.
But anyone cool that uses fulltext RSS gets an auto subscribe from me.
Substack and Ghost both support RSS. Problem is no one uses it anymore. They either donât know or donât care. It also doesnât provide an option for paid subscriptions.
I think i only follow Robert Evans. Have any ghost recs?
What, no Jason Pargin?
What on Earth? They hosted like three Nazis, which is part of the overall commitment to letting people talk which leads them to host a ton of really good people. And then, when everyone on the internet yelled at them for it, raising a pretty reasonable counterpoint, they kicked the Nazis off. That all happened over a year ago.
I read the citation for this statement. What it says is very different from actively promoting the work of fascists and recruiting them. There is a whole fascinating conversation to be had about why some high-profile lefty journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald all of a sudden became Nazis, but itâs very misleading to assign 100% of the blame in this way to Substack, purely because they were working with those people before it really became completely clear to everyone that they for whatever bizarre reason had become Nazis. Itâs a lot more complex situation that is being summarized in this extremely glib spin-soaked fashion.
Okay, fair enough. This is pretty interesting and I hadnât known it.
On the other hand, Substack also hosts Sy Hersh, Tim Snyder, Salman Rushdie, and God knows who else. If they were planning to slant their coverage based on the fact that Andreesenâs company gave them $15 million in 2019 (which they then quickly turned around and gave big chunks of to working journalists), youâd think they would be making some kind of effort to downplay the leftist voices which they are currently hosting, outnumbering the âproblematicâ voices which might be there but which I have literally never run across there.
Elon Musk also, apparently, tried to buy Substack in 2023, and they told him to fuck off.
This whole article reads like a bad-faith hit piece aimed at one of the organizations that actually is trying to provide a space for good journalism including left-wing authors, and making sure that itâs sustainable and they can get paid. By trumping up some various things into much bigger deals than they need to be.
I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets, encouraging people on the left to savage and abandon them for various little misdemeanors until the only news outlets left are either bought and purchased by open fascists, or too small and scattered to make a difference?
The author of the article. It doesnât take long to uncover their politics and they are absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.
Thereâs nothing really wrong with substack. People just like to shit on anything that doesnât pass whatever purity test they happen to use.
How do you know that? Do you know them personally, or audited them or something?
I donât know that they are, and looking over their resume it does seem unlikely. But, also, I would have said that same thing looking at Taibbiâs or Greenwaldâs resume in 2017. I just know that in this story, they are presenting things in this absolutely wildly inaccurate fashion that would be right at home in a right-wing conspiracy. Certainly, working at The Intercept for a long time isnât some kind of bulwark against being infected with right-wing-propaganda-ism, with Greenwald himself as one absolutely interesting counterexample clearly on offer.
Thank you for the additional context, Iâve heard peoples criticisms of substack but hadnât heard any of this additional info
Ghost still seems cool though :)
Yeah, Ghost is great. Iâm not trying to say any bad thing about it. I think theyâre slightly different: Substack went to bat in a big way to foster a community where real journalists could do their journalism there, and get paid for it, and to a large extent it worked. Thatâs why there are so many high-profile lefties writing there. Ghost is trying to set up a FOSS-style platform that anyone can use. Ghost has monetization too, but they didnât prime the pump with it nearly as much as Substack did.
Theyâre both great. I think itâs pretty likely that anyone whoâs screaming about Nazis on Substack is just looking for reasons to scream, and the Nazis have very little to do with it except as an excuse.
Really glad you brought the opposite perspective to the table here đ thank you!
That and the nature of this community lol. I think everybody reading this would prefer federated/distributed communication over centralized control.
Nazis on a server? Donât visit that server. Nazis visit your server? You got some simple decisions to make on if your server is going to be a Nazi server.
So like I said, the whole thing is pointless, because Substack changed their minds and kicked out the Nazis about a year ago. Anyone who is attacking them for being a Nazi platform is looking for an excuse, because it isnât true anymore.
Thatâs the point, right? Give public pressure to platforms so they will deplatform the Nazis? What sense does it make to fail to notice when they do, and pretend that are still hosting Nazis, and talk incessantly about it when some important non-Nazi is just trying to pursue the critically endangered act of journalism on this platform which has no Nazis?
Why would you do that?
The real problem is that there are crazy people who define anybody right of them as a Nazi.
But, weâre not ready to have that conversation yet
Views likeâŚ
Found the Nazi lol
A great example of what Iâm talking about.
âDisagree? Youâre a Naziâ
Youâre cheapening the word and helping them become normalized.
Someone needs to tell Carole Cadwallader to move her resistance headquarters out of the Nazi bar. There are a lot of people whoâd subscribe to her journalism if it didnât also involve funding the enemy.
Is there no FOSS alternative we can promote?
Ghost is FOSS, thatâs part of the whole point.
Ah my bad, I saw $9 on the site and figured it was a paid service things
Yeah, they have a paid+hosted option, or you can use the FOSS stuff it is based on and go it on your own. Itâs a pretty good system I think.
I donât think the software matters much tbh. Itâs about payment aggregation, search hit aggregation, and for some âprestigeâ substack writers, actually getting paid by the platform.
Has Ghost refused to host âNaziâ publications?
Yes:
That sounds like theyâd ban content promoting the eating of the rich, too.
Iâm all for banning fascist content, but I donât wanna lose the French revolution vibes.
Itâs a standard terms of service and a verbal âcommitmentâ which isnât worth the paper itâs printed on.
Iâm sure youâll find the exact same wording on substackâs tos.
The problem is that what social media denizens call Nazi and what Ghost and substack call Nazi are all wildly different things.
How do readers access Ghost? I got sucked into a trial membership but I donât intend to publish, just read, like I can do on substack. I donât want to be on the problematic platform but canât figure out how to gradually use Ghost instead, especially since hardly anyoneâs over there yet.
The attraction of substack for at least some writers is that substack actually pays their more popular or prestigious writers. I donât know how many or whether there is a published list of them, but at least a few of them are getting paid rather well (6 figures/year or maybe more). If Substack is recruiting and paying Nazis, then that is of interest and concern. Most writers there arenât getting paid by substack, though they may have readers who buy subscriptions. That is open to pretty much everyone and the fanfiction saying âdonât like, donât readâ works for me here. Saying Ghost is a more attractive platform because it has more censorship is kind of a head scratcher. And calling Taibbi and Greenwald Nazis is ridiculous. Disliking the Democrats doesnât make someone into a Nazi.
That said, I donât personally like substack very much and am always glad to hear about alternatives.
Can a reader user on Ghost follow multiple Ghost accounts? I havenât used Substack but my understanding is that it is similar to Patreon and OF in that I can subscribe to multiple accounts and have them show up in a central feed. Can I do this as a subscriber on Ghost? And do multiple servers federate to allow for that?
Substack has had a Nazi problem since its inception. At first, there was a liberal backlash, but they all eventually went there anyway.
Still remember the decoder podcast where the CEO was asked, would you remove an article that says âwe should deport all brown peopleâ, and he danced around how he wouldnât get into specifics of moderation.
Just your standard âFree speech absoluteismâ
Suppose it makes sense to use a cybertruck as the hero photo then
Iâve seen people defend Substack saying itâs not so bad, or the bad is a necessary evil to protect free speech.
Iâm gonna say it: fuck free speech, I like myself some censorship. I sincerely believe some things are too harmful to be allowed to openly proliferate, that thereâs often a feasible path to reaching that conclusion, and itâs not that difficult.
We mustnât avoid this because âit harms free speech.â Nazis love that argument, and theyâre a threat to much more than just free speech. They shouldnât get to block attempts at censoring them, and they specially shouldnât get support to do so, because theyâre one of the reasons itâs necessary in the first place.
âBut not every case is clear-cut like Nazis,â people will say, âyou shouldnât support censorship, since it can be used for evil. Innocent ideas always get censored, too.â To which Iâll reply, âtell me more about those innocent ideas.â When that happens, tell me. Iâll reach out to people in charge, spread the news, get mad, help you in any way I can to fix it. Weâll do it together. Fucking tell me more.
But lo and behold, many innocent ideas turn out to be dog-whistles or worse, itâs always the same shit.
I donât care if itâs Substack, or Ghost, or Twitter, or Reddit, or whatever. Itâs one thing to platform harmful views unaware. I get it, moderation is hard. Once aware, though, if your response is âbut free speech,â fuck off. It is moral and correct to censor Nazis. Same for people saying immigrants will eat your pets, or that gays want to sexualize children, change their genders, and harm women. Fuck that.
Platforms defining themselves on free speech is a red flag. âWeâre popular with both extremesâ isnât a defense, itâs a self-report that youâre just a mercenary and like it that wayâboth sides being users means double the revenue.
Substack may not be Nazi-central, but itâs surely a product of broligarchy.
Surely âthere are not actually any Nazis on Substackâ is a fair counterargument to âSubstack has a Nazi problem and no one should listen to all of these good journalists who are on it now that even the tiny minority of Nazis have been ejectedâ is different from ânot so bad.â
Surely âthere are excellent journalists saying excellent things on Substack, and no Nazisâ is different from ânecessary evil to protect free speech.â
Youâre living in opposite world, man.
If you think my problem with Substack is âNazis are there right now,â then you didnât get it. I mustâve not explained myself well, and thatâs on me, but youâre missing the point regardless.
Nazis are part of my explanation because it ought to be clear to any reasonable reader how they should be dealt with, but one can still be horrible without being an outright Nazi. Those people should be dealt with similarly. Substack will see something horrible and first ask, âbut how would our handling of this affect free speech?â which is a disgrace and a red flag.
Iâm commenting on a larger issue related to the topic. At no point do I say people shouldnât listen to good journalists because of their platform of choice. At no point do I claim there are Nazis there. To reiterate: bad is not specifically and exclusively Nazis.
Youâre answering something else, man.
Got it.
Got it.
Anyway, the core of my point is that anyone whoâs talking about this type of free speech argument on Substack, particular if itâs specifically applied in the context of Nazis, is largely living in a fantasy-land.
You are commenting under an article that says âA lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem,â and then saying that youâre not talking about Nazis.
You are saying âthe bad is a necessary evil to protect free speech,â and not at all addressing the fact that the âbadâ doesnât appear to exist on modern Substack. If you have seen it, where have you seen it?
Thereâs a lot of this type of innuendo in the OP article and in your response. Iâm dealing only with your factual arguments, sort of leaving aside things like this âmany innocent ideas turn out to be dog-whistlesâ âitâs always the same shitâ and things. If you want me to try to mount some kind of counterargument for the broligarchy claim, I can I guess. How would you define the broligarchy?
If youâre upset that I am mischaracterizing your argument as being about Nazis (because in some crazy fashion I got that idea), tell me what ideas you are in favor of removing from Substack. Where are they on Substack, right now?
I actually do agree with Substackâs original moderation stance, precisely for reasons of free speech. We can talk about that if you want, although itâs a more complex conversation and we probably wonât come to agree on it. But that whole side of things is completely moot at this point, because they caved to the pressure and removed all the Nazis, quite a while ago.
So why are you still upset at them? Wasnât that the goal, to mount public pressure, and deplatform the Nazis?
Edit:
I should answer this, also. What are you saying the solution should be, if not to avoid Substack?
I donât agree with your characterization of the âproblemâ with Substack, in terms of there being Nazi-adjacent content they are not moderating. But if there does turn out to be that content, what should you and I be doing about it?
I literally linked an example.
Follow the links.
Link.
I had a feeling, and maybe this reply isnât outright confirmation, but itâs enough. I think you tunnel visioned so hard on defending poor Substack and free speech that youâre not even properly reading what youâre replying to. Youâre going up and down this thread, finger on the trigger, and the moment you see the word Nazi you just fire.
Youâre right, we probably wouldnât agree, and if my read on you is any good, Iâd rather not risk wasting time on that conversion.
Okay, so youâre in favor of removing any content which is dishonest and anti-gay from Substack. Fair enough, I get it.
Sounds good. What do you think should be done about Substackâs hosting of anti-gay content? Do you think it should impact me posting Tim Snyder articles from Substack? Do you think itâs accurate to summarize it as âNaziâ content?
Itâs hard to give up because some of the musicians I really like post there, and indie musicians are often struggling financially and Substack is simply a bigger platform.